Brendan O'Neill

Editor of spiked, a columnist for the Big Issue, and a blogger for the Daily Telegraph

Brendan O’Neill is the editor of spiked, the online magazine that
wants to make history as well as report it, and is a columnist for The
Big Issue in London and The Australian in, er, Australia.

He also blogs for the Daily Telegraph and has written for a variety of
publications in both Europe and America. The Guardian says he is a
"Marxist proletarian firebrand" and Peter Tatchell says he is a "smug
shite".

He is the author of Can I Recycle My Granny And 39 Other
Eco-Dilemmas, published by Hodder & Stoughton and described by the BBC as a “skidmark on the gusset of environmentalism”.

The thread tying together all this excitement about the new Ghostbusters is the idea that it's good for old culture to be remade in a more politically and morally acceptable way. But is it? Heaven help anyone who thinks movies should be fun (and that classic movies should be left alone) rather than being turned into fat adverts for sexual equality.

For making a few offensive, off-colour jokes about women and sex, Dapper Laughs has been chased off TV, off university campuses and off theatre stages across the country by a <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/29993873" target="_hplink">fuming mob</a> of self-righteous commentators, feminist campaigners, angry tweeters and student censors.

To all those people saying, "This isn't a free speech case, they were simply jailed for making death threats!", I say: "Not so fast..." Firstly, because they <em>were not</em> found guilty of committing the old offence of "threatening to kill or murder any Person"; and secondly, because the act that they were found guilty under does, very clearly, have implications for free speech

What we can see in this study showing that more and more young women feel vulnerable, fearful and harassed is the tragic victory of Victim Feminism, of a feminism whose main aim seems to be to convince young women that life is hard, abuse is rife, words can harm, and being a woman is a really dangerous occupation.

There's a palpable streak of narcissism among British-born niqab-wearers. In certain Islamic countries, the full face veil has the effect of making women anonymous. In Britain, it has the opposite effect: it makes you stand out from the crowd and turns you into an object of intrigue.

All of us have a visceral, emotional reaction to the use of chemical weapons. It repulses us... Yet there's a question that must be asked: why are we more offended by the killing of civilians with chemical weapons than we are by the slaughter of far greater numbers of civilians with conventional weapons?

Usually the month of August is referred to as the silly season. The political exploitation of 14-year-old schoolgirl Hannah Smith's suicide by both tabloid and broadsheet newspapers suggests we might have to rechristen it the sinister season. Even for a press like ours, with its many well-known moral lapses, the shroud-waving over Hannah's death marks a new low.

The panic about these keyboard-tapping folk devils, this handful of very sad men who are said to pose an existential threat to the safety and self-esteem of the whole of womankind, conforms precisely to Cohen's definition of a moral panic. With one difference: the moral panic over trolls has even less substance.

These sassy campaigners for women's rights would baulk like crazy at any suggestion that they are cut from the same cloth as sexist, patronising officials in places like Dubai who get to determine what the plebs may see. And yet the war on lads' mags in both Blighty and in more religious countries weirdly springs from the same source...

In short, the PM is making it a crime to have certain, warped sexual fantasies, to get excited, in your head, by things that the vast majority of us find disgusting. He's making the enjoyment of certain fantasy images and fantasy words into a thoughtcrime.

To claim that Western politicians bear true responsibility for what happened in Woolwich is to argue that the killers themselves do not bear responsibility, presumably because their ability to exercise moral judgement was overridden by... what, precisely? By a peculiarly Muslim fury?

According to 14 lawyers specialising in equality law, supermarkets that sell lads' mags such as <em>Nuts</em> and <em>Zoo</em> could potentially be sued under sexual discrimination laws, on the basis that displaying such saucy material in workplaces possibly constitutes "sexual harassment under the Equality Act 2010"... Apparently such magazines are "deeply harmful to women", and therefore shops that stock them run the risk of being done for discriminating against or even harassing their female shoppers. There's so much wrong with this campaign it's hard to know where to start.

Any priest or politician or member of the public who criticises or votes against same-sex marriage can expect to be instantly branded a bigot, an unevolved Neanderthal, possibly even abnormal, and can also expect to be cast out of polite society.

I'm no fan of the Socialist Workers' Party, so I won't be losing much sleep over the fact that it is currently imploding under the weight of two sex scandals. But I do find it intriguing that this intellectually moribund organisation is having the final nail pounded into its coffin, not by the state or by the right, but by feminism.

Again and again, the assumption is made that women - far more so than men or teenage boys - are not cut out for negotiating the often dark, offensive internet. And so they need protecting from it; websites that offend them must be closed, and trolls who troll them must be silenced.

Moral crusades against gambling are nothing new. There have always been social reformers, religious folk and promoters of good manners who have found themselves more shocked by the moral slovenliness of the poor than by the existence of poverty itself.

How do we explain this extraordinary double standard? Why is Brown's crime seen as so much worse than similar crimes committed by other well-known people? Well, there is one important difference between Brown and the others. Brown is black.

Society as a whole doesn't benefit from the open invitation to every person who had a bad encounter with Savile to reveal all. In fact, society, the big communal space we all inhabit, looks set to be the biggest loser in all this.